In the electronic components industry, efficient article handling techniques are ever-important to the manufacture of price-competitive products. Two distinct handling techniques for discrete articles are respectively referred to as sequential handling and mass handling. Each of these techniques have advantages and disadvantages, such that for a particular manufacturing operation one of these techniques may be preferred over the other.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,884,347 to Gallagher et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 4,136,765 to Abraham et al., both being assigned to the assignee of this application, show sequential handling of discrete articles. Each patent shows particular article handling methods and apparatus including selectively reorienting misoriented articles. Thus, in manufacturing operations using sequential handling techniques sequentially reorienting some articles with respect to others is known.
However, in the manufacture of articles, such as diodes, resistors or small mechanical switches, mass handling techniques may be preferred in preparing the articles for selected operations. Such mass handling techniques do not lend themselves to individual recognition of the orientation of articles and sequential reversal or reorientation of randomly misoriented ones.
As an example of typical mass handling techniques, U.S. Pat. No. 3,480,165 to Hurst et al., assigned to the assignee of this application, relates to handling discrete articles and particularly to loading a plurality of articles into a workholder. According to the Hurst et al. disclosure, paramagnetic diodes are magnetically aligned, picked up and transferred with a magnetic wand, and then loaded into an apertured workholder in spaced parallel relationship to one another. Typically for such mass handling techniques, the disclosed methods do not provide for reorienting misoriented articles.